Tag Archives: Monarchs

A monarch butterfly on it’s favorite source of food and habitat. Learn how to plant milkweed & save the monarch from extinction. Photo by Elizabeth Howard, founder of Journey North.

Calling all nature nuts and monarch butterfly enthusiasts! You can help save the beautiful orange & black monarch butterfly from extinction. It’s easy and you can do it no matter where you live, whether that’s a Manhattan apartment, a suburban ranch or an organic horse farm in Vermont.

Jose Luis Alvarez has devoted his life to conserving monarch habitat in Mexico. He’s traveling to Vermont this summer to help us conserve the butterfly’s habitat here in New England.

I’m super excited today because our friend Jose Luis Alvarez is coming to visit Vermont this fall to collaborate with us on a project to help save the Monarch butterfly. Jose Luis is a silviculturist in Mexico who has devoted his life to restoring the forested winter habitat of the Monarch. Last month I traveled to Michoacan, Mexico to meet Jose Luis & see his work. I love Monarchs & we’ve been conserving their summer habit here in Vermont for many years so I thought maybe we should collaborate and get some Vermont-Mexico synergy going!

Last week I visited Michoacan, Mexico, the winter home to Vermont’s big, beautiful orange and black Monarch butterfly. As a wood furniture company we at Vermont Woods Studios wanted to support a reforestation project that would help protect the endangered butterfly’s habitat. I did quite a bit of research, trying to understand who was leading area environmental efforts and then I traveled to Mexico to see if we could help them.

A freak spring storm just struck Michoacan, Mexico leaving a foot of snow & putting the future of the Monarch Butterfly in jeopardy. Can the species survive the snow and cold? Photo courtesy of Homero Gomez Gonzalez, Chairman at the el Rosario Monarch Sanctuary.

We Plant a Tree for Every Order

Believe it or not that’s why our small business was born. We’re not a furniture company that “went green”. Vermont Woods Studios was actually a product of my mid-life crisis/desire to make a difference in this world. Weird, right? For some people it’s all about fast cars, loud motorcycles, sex, drugs or rock & roll. For me it was about forest conservation. It’s a long story (which I did tell to Laura Dunn of the Huffington Post, in the remote case you may be interested) but the point is:

The World Is Losing It’s Forests

Many people may not see it as a big deal but if you somehow found your way to this quirky green blog, there’s a good chance you’ll be concerned about these statistics:

More than half of the world’s 193 countries have already lost 90% or more of their forest cover

Rainforests that once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface now cover a mere 6%, yet they are home to over half the species of plants and animals in the world

We are losing the rainforest at the rate of 1.5 acres every second

Experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be gone from this earth before you are

We sell furniture made of sustainably harvested North American hardwoods in an effort to keep rainforest trees in the ground and out of the timber trade. The idea is to conserve habitat for endangered species like the tiger as well as indigenous peoples.

So We’re Trying to Help

Last year we celebrated our 10th year in business. Since 2005 we’ve planted about 7500 trees, many of them through The Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees project. More importantly we’ve kept a similar number of rare rainforest trees out of the furniture market as we’ve used only sustainably harvested North American trees. Who is responsible for this progress? You… our customers, our readers and our partners. Your support enables us to throw our energy into environmental projects we think are important and for that we are immensely grateful.

Monarch butterflies over-winter in oyamel trees in Mexico but illegal logging has almost entirely wiped out their forest habitat. Over the past 20 years the monarch population has declined by 90 percent. So we’re supporting LCHPP and the reforestation of monarch habitat in Mexico. It’s an exciting project which I invite you to follow on this blog.

Planting Trees in Mexico

Recently we’ve focused our support on a tree-planting project called the La Cruz Habitat Protection Program LCHPP in Michoacan Mexico. This is a reforestation initiative that I discovered during my efforts to help save the Monarch Butterfly, which is native to Vermont but it over-winters in sunny Mexico. I wrote about it recently and will be visiting LCHPP’s project in Mexico next week. Stay tuned for a full report. Anyway…

Conservation Matters To Our Customers, Partners & Staff

Does it matter to you? Post your thoughts on our Facebook or contact me directly at peggy@VermontWoodsStudios.com. I want to know what you think. Thanks for reading!

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